A majority of call center costs are a direct result of salary and benefits paid to employees. In an effort to reduce costs and increase overall operation of call centers, improved efficiency is a necessity. The big push for today's call centers is “operational capacity,” that is, moving calls from a live agent into a self-service channel. This migration demands optimized self-service applications and must still result in a very satisfying caller experience. By improving a call centers “operational capacity,” operational costs associated with employee salary and benefits can be greatly reduced.
Customers calling into companies having automated call centers are typically directed to standard speech recognition applications and hence all customers hear the same call flows and options. This model is inefficient in that a customer must listen to all the standard call flows and options even if the particular customer does not have or use each of the standard call flows and options. This results in increased call durations, which leads directly to increased costs per call. The use of standard call flows and options also waste other resources of the financial services company having the call center as well as wasting the time of the customer. Standard call flows and options are also impersonal to the caller and hence caller satisfaction is reduced. As a result, callers tend to disfavor automated call centers and prefer to speak in person to a live call center service representative. This defeats the purpose and benefits of automated call centers and results in increased costs for the company operating the call center.
One way companies attempt to streamline use of automated call centers is by having numerous de-centralized access numbers—basically, a different access number for each of the financial services company's different resources. By assigning different access numbers for each product or service covered by the call center, telephone calls received can be directly connected to the appropriate service person. While helping to streamline calls, this approach is difficult to manage and burdensome for customers. The financial institute must employ, advertise, and pay for multiple access numbers. Also, most customers have difficulty remembering multiple access numbers. Also, if a customer dials the wrong number, then the customer hears the wrong call flows/options and must default to a live call center service representative thus defeating the purpose and benefits of an automated call center.
Another way companies try and streamline use of automated call centers is through customer customization. Customer customization is where the customer sets preferences or defaults that then dictate the call experience. In this type of customized call system, the customer calls in and then customizes his or her experience for that call, and possibly future calls. This customized call center is customer driven and requires additional time and effort on the part of the customer. Hence, not all customers take advantage of this type of system.
Touch-tone voice recognition systems have been used for self-service telephone applications. In this type of system, the caller listens to a menu list of options and enters the appropriate selection by pushing a key on the dial corresponding to the desired menu choice. With conventional land-based telephones, these touch-tone applications work satisfactorily and have a relatively high accuracy rate. However, with the transition to cellular telephone, these conventional touch-tone applications are not practical and do not work as well. The reason for this is that with land-based telephones the receiver is at the ear and the hand of the caller can be on the dials to respond to the audio prompts being received via the telephone receiver. With cellular telephones, however, the receiver and dials are both on the cellular phone that therefore the caller must constantly move the cellular phone from the ear to a hand position in front of the caller to enter the appropriate response on the dials. This is inefficient and leads to caller errors in entering the correct key on the dials, reduced accuracy rates, and recalls.
What is needed is an automated self-service channel that solves the foregoing problems associated with conventional telephone channels and call centers.